A PRETTY COMPLICATED ORGANISM

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Like many of you, I was stunned by what happened on November 5th. It’s gonna take me some time to reckon with what this all says about the values of a large portion of this country. As part of that reckoning—and for some much-needed relief—I’ve opted to spend less time with media in general for a bit.

But on “the morning after,” I couldn’t ignore an email I got from today’s guest, New York magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell. [You can find it on our website].

What struck me most about his note—which was sent to the magazine’s million-and-a-half subscribers—was what it didn’t say.

There were no recriminations. Nothing about how Kamala Harris had failed to “read the room.” Not a word about Joe Biden’s unwillingness to step aside when he should have. No calls to “resist.” In fact, the hometown president-elect’s name went unspoken (as it is here).

What Haskell did say that left a mark on me was this:

“I consider our jobs as magazine journalists a privilege at times like this.”

I was an editor at Clay Felker’s New York magazine, the editor-in-chief of Boston magazine, and I led the creative team at Inc. magazine. And it was there, at Inc. that I had a similar experience. It was 9/11.

I wrote my monthly column in the haze that immediately followed the attacks, though it wouldn’t appear in print until the December issue. It was titled, “Think Small. No Smaller.” In it, I urged our community of company builders to focus their attention on the things we can control. This is how it ended:

What we can say for certain is that the arena over which any of us has control has, for now, grown smaller. In these smaller arenas, the challenge is to build, or rebuild, in ourselves and our organizations the quiet confidence that we still have the ability to get the right things done.

For all the attention that gets paid to EICs, most of the work you do is done through the members of your team: writers, and editors, and designers, and so many others.

My friend, Dan Okrent, the former Life magazine editor and Print Is Dead guest, once said, “Magazines bring us together into real communities.”

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

WHAT MAKES STEVE BRODNER HAPPY

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When your boss tells you to track down an amusing Steve Brodner factoid to open the podcast with, and one of the first things you find is a, uh, a “dick army,” welp, that’s what you’re going to go with.

Lest you judge me, I can explain. Brodner’s drawing of this army was inspired by a guy who was actually named Dick Armey (A-R-M-E-Y)! He was Newt Gingrich’s wingman back in the nineties. I thought to myself, the people need to know this.

However, with the election now a few days behind us, maybe the time for talking about men and their junk is over?

What you really want to learn about is this Society of Illustrators hall of famer’s career. Brodner’s work, which has been called “unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass, and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion,” has been featured in Rolling Stone, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and many others.

In this episode, Brodner talks about how the death of print has led to the current misinformation crisis. As it gets harder and harder to tell what’s true, the future becomes increasingly uncertain. Even his most biting drawings are rooted in truth.

“Satire doesn't work if you are irresponsibly unreasonably inventive. If satire doesn't have truth in it, it's not funny.”

A production note: This episode was recorded exactly one week before the election. As our conversation began, we took turns telling stories about memorable election night parties, and our plans for November 5th. Here’s Steve, talking about his plans…

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

SHE’S OUR TYPE

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Everybody knows that in May 2023, a jury found Donald Trump liable for defaming and abusing E. Jean Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. And everybody also knows that in January 2024, another jury found Trump liable for defamation against her to the tune of $83.3 million. P.S., with interest, his payout will now total over $100 million.

But not everybody remembers—because we are guppies, and because, ahem, Print is Dead, y’all—that E. Jean is a goddamn swashbucking magazine-world legend: a writer of such style, wit, and sheer ballsy joie de vivre that she carved out a name for herself in the boys club of New Journalism, writing juicy and iconic stories in the ‘70s and ‘80s for Outside, Esquire, Playboy, and more—and then finally leapt over to women’s magazines, where she held down the role of advice columnist at Elle for, wait for it, 27 years. Elle is where we intersected with E.Jean and where we first saw up close her boundless enthusiasm and generosity for womankind.

We’ll also never forget sitting at one of the magazine’s annual fancypants dinners honoring Women in Hollywood—these are real star-studded affairs, folks—when Jennifer Aniston stood up to receive her award and started her speech with a shoutout to her beloved "Auntie E.,” whose advice she and millions of other American women had devoured, and lived by, for decades.

Here’s the truth: The woman that most of the world came to know through the most harrowing circumstances imaginable really is and has always been that fearless, that unsinkable. It’s not a persona—it’s the genuine article. And when you hear her stories about how hard she slogged away for decades to finally get her big break in publishing, listeners, you will have a whole new respect for her.

As E. Jean tells us herself in this interview, she does very, very little press. So we couldn’t be more honored that our friend and idol and The Spread’s most enthusiastic hype woman sat down after hours with us for this interview. We just hope we did her justice!

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

SOUL SURVIVOR

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Just about every magazine Richard Baker worked for has died. Even one called Life.

Also dead: The Washington Post Magazine, Vibe, Premiere, and Parade. Another, Saveur, also died, but has recently been resurrected. And Us Magazine? A mere shadow of its former self.

Sadly, Baker’s career narrative is not that uncommon. (That’s why you’re listening to a podcast called Print Is Dead).

But Richard Baker is a survivor. He’s survived immigrating from Jamaica as a kid. He’s survived the sudden and premature loss of three influential and beloved mentors. And he survived a near-fatal medical emergency in the New York subway.

Yet, in the face of all that carnage, Richard Baker just keeps going. To this day, he’s living the magazine dream—“classic edition”—as a designer at a sturdy newsstand publication (Inc. magazine), in a brick-and-mortar office (7 World Trade Center), working with real people, and making something beautiful with ink and paper.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

SMILING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE

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In the past few weeks, Will Welch has taken a bit of flack for letting Beyoncé promote her new whiskey label on the cover of GQ’s October issue, with an interview that one X user described as “an intimate email exchange between GQ and several layers of Beyonce’s comms team.”

Whether that kind of thing rankles you or not—and yes, we asked him about it—in the five years since Welch took over, GQ seems to be doing as well or better than everybody else in the industry. Why? Ask around. He’s got a direct line to celebrities, who consider him a personal friend. He’s got real credibility with The Fashion People. And because of both of these things, advertisers love him.

Perhaps most importantly, his boss Anna Wintour loves him.

The Atlanta-born Welch started his career at the alternative music and culture mag the Fader in the early aughts, and jumped to GQ in 2007. For a decade under EIC Jim Nelson, he operated as the magazine’s fashion-and-culture svengali, eventually becoming the creative director of the magazine and the editor of the brand’s fashion spinoff, GQ Style.

In 2019, Wintour tapped him for the big job: Editor-in-Chief of GQ—a title that in 2020 was recast in the current Condé Nast survival-mode as Global Editorial Director of GQ, overseeing 19 editions around the world.

After speaking with Welch only a few hours after the Beyonce cover dropped, we get what all the fuss is about. He is a great sport with good hair and just enough of a Southern accent who is confident-yet-never-cocky about his mission at GQ.

Let other people bemoan the “death of print.” Will Welch is having a blast at the Last Supper.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

WHEN ‘HOUSE’ IS NOT A HOME

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Dominique Browning jokes that after the interview for this episode, she might end up having PTSD. After more than 30 years writing and editing at some of the top magazines in the world, Browning has blocked a lot of it out.

And after listening today, you’ll understand why.

At Esquire, where she worked early in her career, Browning says she cried nearly every day. There were men yelling and people quitting. Apartment keys being dropped off with mistresses. A flash, even, of a loaded gun in a desk drawer.

At House & Garden, where she ended her magazine career in 2007 after 13 years as the editor-in-chief, the chaos was less Mad Men and more Devil Wears Prada. It was glitzy Manhattan lunches mixed with fierce competition and co-workers who complained that her wardrobe wasn’t “designer” enough. The day she took the job, she says she felt like she had walked into Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (Her friends had warned her that it was going to be a snake pit.)

When the magazine unexpectedly folded on a Monday, she and her staff were told they had until Friday to clear out their offices. “Without warning,” she says, “our world collapsed.”

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

VIVE LA CREATIVITE!

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There are many reasons for you to hate Fabien Baron (especially if you’re the jealous type).

Here are 7 of them:

• He’s French, which means, among other things, his accent is way sexier than yours.

• He’s spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of supermodels like Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Kate Moss.

• He gets all of his Calvin Klein undies for free.

• Ditto any swag from his other clients: Dior, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, or Armani.

• When he tired of just designing magazines, magazines went and made him their editor-in-chief.

• He was intimately involved in the making of Madonna’s notorious book, Sex. How intimately? We were afraid to ask.

• Also? Vanity Fair called him “The Most Sought-After Creative Director in the World.”

With our pity party concluded, we admit “hate” was probably the wrong word, because after spending time talking to him, it’s easy to see why Baron has been able to live the kind of life many magazine creatives dream of—and why he’s been so incredibly successful.

His enthusiasm is contagious. It’s actually his super power. And it’s a lesson for all of us. When you get next-level excited, as Baron does when he can see the possibilities in a project, his passion infects everybody in the room.

And then, when you learn that Baron believes he’s doing what he was put on this earth to do, and claims that he would do it all for free. You’ve kind of got to believe him.

I never, ever worried about money. I never took a job because of the money. Because I think integrity is very important. I think, like believing that you have a path and that you’re going to follow that path and you’re going to stay on that path and that you’re going to stick to that. And that’s what I’m trying to do.

Welcome to Season 5 of Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!)

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Freeport Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024

THE FIFTH

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You cannot overstate how much Tom Bodkin has changed the Times. In fact, you can say that there was the Times before Tom and the Times after Tom.

The Times before Tom threw as many words as possible at the page, with little regard for the reader. The Times before Tom thought tossing a couple of headshots on the page was all the visual journalism we needed. The Times before Tom held to a hierarchy where designers were the other, somehow not quite journalists.

Then there is The New York Times after Tom.

Tom taught us that design was not only integral to journalism, it was in fact integral to storytelling at its height. The front page that listed the COVID dead was more powerful than any one story could ever be.

Roy Peter Clark, the writing guru at the Poynter Institute, captured it best:

“Nothing much on that front page looked like news as we understand it, that is, the transmission of information,” he wrote. “Instead it felt like a graphic representation of the tolling of bells. A litany of the dead.”

Personally, Tom taught me something that made it easier to lead the newsroom in the digital age: Design demands a level of open-mindedness to the possibilities of different types of storytelling. It also rewards collaboration, since the most perfect stories are told by different disciplines working together to convey the best version of the truth every day.

Those, in fact, are the qualities that mark the modern, digital New York Times. Qualities that honestly have made it the most successful news report of the day.

Hard to imagine we—certainly not I—would have been prepared for this new world without Tom’s leadership.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Mountain Gazette, Commercial Type, and Lane Press.

Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum LLC ©2021–2024